The Red Queen (41 page)

Swallow drew my attention to a great pile of map cases, but I noticed a plast-covered map stuck on the wall behind him, the only wall free of shelving. It had several pins stuck into it in different places, but when I went close enough to read them, they were not names but only more meaningless sequences of numbers and figures.

Ana pointed out two little stacks of drawers under the table, either side of the space for the chair. She pulled one out and it was full of plast-covered papers, or perhaps, I thought, examining them more closely, they were not papers but plasts that had been scribed upon. To my relief, these contained words, but after the first few sheets I realised that still most of the scribing was numbers, and the few words were largely incomprehensible to me.

I opened another drawer, and this time, I found notes about the computermachine program, which Kelver Rhonin spoke of as
G.O.D.
Bestowing the name God on a computer program suggested a quirkiness of mind I saw no evidence for in the chamber, so it did not surprise me when I finally came upon a note that spoke of
the Globally Observant Device (G.O.D.) being developed as part of a complex automatic rescue system that could be deployed in newly contaminated zones or highly dangerous and volatile situations.

Skimming one paper after another, I learned that G.O.D. had been an initiative of a Council of Powers, that oversaw global projects. This was the name of the body with representatives of the five main powers that had existed in the Beforetime, which had been responsible for the Sentinel project. I found a note that appeared to have been scribed by Kelver Rhonin, containing a brief diatribe against the people behind the Pellmar Quadrants, who had slowed the development for almost a year with their objections and fears. I wondered what they had objected to, and why he was so irritated, and if he had scribed his irritation to prevent himself speaking it aloud. Then I wondered
when
Kelver Rhonin had scribed these words. It had to have been before the end of his world, because he was objecting to systems and people that would have been swallowed by the Great White.

I continued to go through the drawers, looking for something that might have been scribed after the Great White, surprised yet again that there was nothing truly personal to be found – no letters from people on paper or the queer thin plast stuff that seemed to serve for paper, no plast-covered pictures of family such as the Teknoguild had unearthed in drowned Newrome.

It was Swallow who found the small booklet from which protruded many slips of paper and scrawled notes. It was a paper book but sealed in a plast sleeve that could be opened, among the maps. It was very similar to the book in which Jacob had recorded his diary to Hannah and I felt an ache of loss thinking of the diary. Then I thought of the stone sword and offered up a fervent wish-prayer that Ahmedri had returned to our camp to collect everything of importance, if indeed the andrones had not brought them to Midland.

I returned to the viewing chamber, resolving to raise the matter with God, using the androne, on the way to find Miryum.

The vision on the screen had not changed; the androne was still walking over the sunlit dunes. I sat in one of the fixed chairs and opened the booklet with anticipation, only to find it contained more sequences of numbers and letters scribed in a spidery script. Disappointed, I was closing it when a piece of paper fluttered out. I picked it up and my heart leapt against my chest, for scribed in a bold hand, and underlined darkly, was:
Sentinel!

My hands trembled slightly as I rifled eagerly through the book, trying to work out where the piece of paper had fallen from, but there were only figures and occasionally sets of letters and a few words I could recognise, none of them amounting to a complete sentence. I thought about all the number sequences and wondered if they
were
calculations, as I had supposed, or something scribed in the language in which Pavo had told me computermachines communicated, and which humans who had worked with them had mastered. Code he had called it. Having spoken with Ines at Oldhaven, and with God, I did not understand the need for a number language, but now I wondered if the notebook might not be filled with Kelver Rhonin’s thoughts in code. Maybe in creating God, he had grown so accustomed to communicating in that form, that he scribed notes to himself in it. The other possibility was that he had scribed in code to hide his words, but from whom, and why?

I examined the other scraps of paper in the notebook, but discovered nothing of any interest in them. Several seemed to be little more than pieces of a torn-up page of scribing, and it occurred to me that they might have no importance, save as page markers. I looked again at the scrap upon which Sentinel was written and realised it, too, had been part of a larger sheet, yet the word seemed to me to have been scribed on the scrap as it was.

Restoring the slips of paper and the notebook to its plast sleeve, I set it to one side with the small pile of papers I would take back to the residence. Among these were four smaller plast maps, which I took out now and examined again. One said
Eden,
three said
Ishkar
, but again there were no other names on any of the maps that might help me to know where they were in the world, only more numbers. They had been in a small box, and now, at the bottom of it, I found a transparent sleeve of plast in which there were a number of sheets of very white paper covered in the same perfect tiny black script as in Beforetime books. They did not appear to be pages taken from a book, I thought, and read a little of the scribing. My heart began to pound at the realisation that I was reading a letter. I turned to see who had signed it, expecting to see Kelver Rhonin’s name, and found only an ornate E. Searching through the loose pages, I found that the letter had been scribed
to
Kelver Rhonin, and that there were a good twenty separate communications. Clearly Kelver Rhonin had valued them or their sender, to keep them so carefully.

Yet I read one page and found it contained only some rather dry and precise instructions and advice about the installation of newly arrived cryopods in the Galon Institute. That told me it had definitely been sent before the Great White, else how should the cryopods mentioned have been delivered? I read another two of the letters and decided E had been a fellow worker instructing Kelver Rhonin, as if the latter had been newly engaged in some aspect of E’s own work, which was cryopod installation. It made sense that Kelver would have needed to know about it, since God would have to deal with cryopods as part of the search and rescue program.

But why he had kept these communications concealed under maps in a plast sleeve in a box was a mystery. Unless they were simply left over from a time when that work had been uppermost in his mind and he had put the maps on top of them absently. It might even be that, after the Great White occurred, Kelver had ceased to visit the workspace. After all, according to God, he had travelled to Northport to see if he could reconnect Midland and the other settlements of Pellmar Quadrants to a govamen terminal. No doubt this had happened quite soon after the Great White, for he and the other people of the Pellmar Quadrants must have been frantic to know what was happening in the rest of the world.

I continued to read through the letters, hoping E would speak of Sentinel or even God, but the scribing was all of cryopods and a place called Eden, to which E had been recently relocated. The name was familiar and I strove to remember where I had heard it before. Then it came to me. Dell had called the garden deep under the earth at Oldhaven
Eden.
But surely that was a name she had taken from some Beforetime place. Then I remembered where else I had heard it. Eden was the name of the place where Cassy’s Beforetime Teknoguild friend Doktaruth had sent beasts in experimental cryopods, when she had to make hasty space for the development of human-sized cryopods. She had told Cassy that her helper had come up with the name, and that it had proven to be a good one. It was also the place where two flame birds had been sent.

‘What have you found?’ Swallow asked, coming up to look over my shoulder.

I told him, and remembered in the telling that, when I first awoke and still believed the androne to be a man, it had told me that beasts were not collected any more by the Tumen because such specimens belonged in Eden and Eden no longer responded to any calls. Swallow said he supposed Eden had been unable to respond because it had been destroyed in the Great White or because communications between computermachines had ceased.

He wandered away, leaving me to ponder the possibility that Kelver Rhonin had not returned from his abortive trip to Northport because he had gone further, seeking a govamen terminal from which he could connect to Northport. God had told me that Hannah went to Northport to see what had happened to Kelver Rhonin, and whether there was a connection between the main computermachine there and a govamen computermachine. She had found no sign of the other Beforetimer, and the main computermachine there had not been connected to a govamen computermachine. But where would he have gone seeking a govamen computermachine? He had several maps of a place called Ishkar. Was it possible this was the location of a govamen terminal? And there must have been a computermachine terminal at Eden, given that the place had been set up by the govamen.

I read on to find that E continued to scribe of cryopods, even though he had moved to another workplace, and it became clear to me that he had been much involved in their early development. This led me to wonder if E had met or known Cassy’s Doktaruth, since the cryopod project had been hers initially, though it had focused on beasts and had apparently not been very highly regarded. A few pages later my guess was confirmed when E scribed of a visit made to his workspace at Hegate Complex to meet with an old friend who was also the head of the cryopod development team. He did not name her, but surely it was Doktaruth. There was some talk of the unnamed friend’s concern about the way the project was being rushed through its human testing phase by the govamen, and then E referred to a visit to the ‘fledgling Pellmar Quadrants, where the lovely winged banner of communal idealism flutters’, saying that it had been wonderful to meet for the first time. Clearly he and Kelver Rhonin had met here and the tone of this communication was far warmer than the others. It was odd to think that E and Kelver had met only after they had scribed each other for some time, and after E had moved from Hegate to Eden, but clearly a genuine friendship had been struck up, judging by the letter.

Something else occurred to me.

In my dreams, Doktaruth had spoken of a fellow Beforetime teknoguilder called Erlinder, who had worked with her before escorting the cryopods containing beasts from what I now knew to be Hegate Complex to the newly established Eden. Indeed it had been Erlinder who had given Eden its name, therefore it could be that E was Erlinder. That meant Kelver Rhonin, Erlinder and Doktaruth all worked for or with the govamen on teknoguilder projects.

‘Eden, I get, if Erlinder was E, because he was supposed to live there as a sort of caretaker,’ I muttered to myself distractedly. ‘But why would Kelver Rhonin scribe the word Sentinel, given neither of them had anything to do with it?’

‘Prior to the Class B Cataclysm, Prime User Kelver Rhonin had been following the feeds and holo reports of growing protests at the Hegate Complex, where the prototype Sentinel was nearing the end of its testing phase,’ God said calmly, obviously having taken my muttered words as a question. ‘Prime User Kelver Rhonin was not alone in his interest in Sentinel and the furore surrounding it. Many of his colleagues had been involved in developing aspects of the program, or complementary programs, and there was a great deal of discussion and debate about it between them.’

Was that all it had been? I wondered. It occurred to me that I could simply question God about the doings of Kelver Rhonin. The man must have been dead for centuries, wherever he had gone after Northport, but Pavo or perhaps Jak had once told me that computermachines never forgot anything.

‘Did Prime User Kelver Rhonin communicate with someone called Erlinder?’ I asked.

‘Yes, User Seeker,’ God affirmed. ‘Doctor Elke Erlinder worked on the development of cryopod technology before relocation to Eden as its director. The primary interactions between Prime User Kelver Rhonin and Doctor Erlinder were related to this work, though they began almost simultaneously with Doctor Erlinder’s move from Hegate Complex to Eden. The two men continued to communicate over the installation of machinery and programs that would enable their automatic creation and maintenance, but their communications were not always work related. Some had privacy seals.’

So they
had
become friends, I thought triumphantly, and it was a friendship Kelver Rhonin had valued enough that he had kept all of the letters, even those that had been scribed before the friendship had truly begun. Yet still I had the niggling feeling that I was missing something important.

‘Did they ever speak of Sentinel?’ I asked.

‘They spoke often of the Sentinel Project, User Seeker,’ God said. ‘The subject first arose when the Sentinel pilot was due to be connected in a limited capacity to the Balance of Terror Arsenal Base for the first time. User Kelver Rhonin asked what Elke Erlinder thought of the project. User Elke told Prime User Kelver Rhonin that he had to think well of its makers because his sister, Doctor Marji Erlinder was one of them. She worked first on the Guardian Project, which later became the Sentinel Project at Inva, and then she was in charge of on-site preparation.’

‘On-site . . . you mean she was involved in setting up the computermachine that was to hold the final Sentinel? The secret complex in the remote place?’

‘Yes, User Seeker,’ God said.

My heart was pounding so hard it was making me feel sick, because surely Doktaruth said something to Cassy in one of my Beforetime dreams about Eden being on the same landmass as the secret base where the final Sentinel would be set up! That meant Elke Erlinder was at Eden and his sister Marji was at the Sentinel base. And Kelver Rhonin knew and had come to be friends with Elke. My momentary elation faded because although I had found a piece of paper with the word Sentinel scribed on it, there was no certainty that Kelver Rhonin had any interest in locating it.